Author:Keir Milburn

Publisher:Polity

ISBN:

The current agitation among young voters in various countries (where there are voters) certainly can be understood as concern for their future, especially climate warming. This compact argument by a Lecturer in Political Economy and Organisation provides deeper insight to what motivates them beyond the energy of youth and idealism. Keir Milburn says it is class struggle, and he dispels the old-fashioned, age-related, notion of “generation gap.” He cites the unusual fact that these young activists are inspired by politicians who are entering their dotage, Jeremy Corbyn in England, and Bernie Sanders in the United States. Why them?

Why now? It’s because generations are not defined by age but by events. He says today’s young people, often called Generation Snowflake (avocado toast), are Generation Screwed. Wage stagnation and the high cost of housing have made impossible for them to get a foothold in the economy. The move to the Right of the majority of older voters threatens to block any change. Thus, the young are moving Left.

In just 124 pages of text, Dr. Milburn has densely packed his thesis with references to history, economics, culture, and philosophy, daunting to the lay reader who is just trying to make sense out of what is going on in politics. But that is his point. We fail to be sufficiently analytical. He mentions that many activist movements have failed because they copy past efforts.

If we truly analyze the situation today, we will see that the economic crisis of 2008 killed our young people’s aspirations, and they lack the experience to understand the sequence of events that are related: the destruction of unions and “the hollowing out of democracy” by a previous generation’s neoliberalism, which favored financial institutions. In developing this theme, Milburn recalls that earlier generations of technical workers had some autonomy over their jobs and job security. It was the younger people who were given less skilled positions that alienated them from their work – but they could move up in time.

More recently, Taylorist forms of management and new technologies have taken away knowledge from all workers of any age. However, right now the older generation still has more assets, and with traditional goals of young people unachievable – marriage, parenthood, home ownership, stability -- there is no youth or teenage time to experiment and reinvent ourselves for adulthood, or, as he says, “The lives of the young are dominated by rent.” He doesn’t mean just housing, but the ways we have access to music, TV, and transportation, by sharing our data with capitalists through what he calls “oligarchic rentierism” and “neofeudalism.”

Milburn believes what will be required is redefinition of “youth and adulthood to break their current entanglement with private property ownership, shifting them instead towards the kinds of common ownership which can act as a solution to the generational divide over access to material security.” Private property is expensive when it is scarce.

He goes on to suggest that there already is potential in the digital world, where property is cheap to reproduce, and it exists in a culture of youth that values “sociality, self-expression, collective creation, and autonomy.” He concludes: “But the most vital plank of any programme must be the massive expansion of cooperative housing and the spread of intergenerational co-housing. He also says a commons needs a community, a government. If you are a member of an HOA, or even a book club, you might be thinking good luck with that, but he sees it happening and even predicts that the elderly will join the commons movement to meet their own needs.

As a lay reader and an English major at that, I was particularly interested in learning more about neoliberalism, as in the U.S. we define ourselves as “liberals” or “conservatives,” and everyone knows that those labels don’t hold. It seems that in Europe the term refers the past 40 years drifting toward laissez faire economy, deregulation, freeing up the markets (e.g., Margaret Thatcher). While classical liberalism emphasizes individual liberty but does accept some government, neoliberals reject group identity; there is no “society.”

Here we might call that libertarianism, but libertarians are on both left and right wings of politics, are fiscally conservative and socially liberal. Neoliberals are unrepentant capitalists, offensive to many democrats. In other words, Milburn is hard to follow because he transcends common politics. That’s refreshing. But in politics, perhaps we need more choices, too.

Milburn teaches at the University of Leicester, known for its research, notably the discovery of genetic fingerprinting and for identifying the remains of King Richard III. His eyes are on diverse movements in societies and cultures, such as: the uses of fairy dust, “anarcho punk” and “Acid Corbynism as a Gateway Drug.”